Agatha Christie First Edition Books

With over 2 billion copies of her work published. Agatha Christie books are third in the world rankings of most books ever published. That’s only just behind The Bible and the Works of William Shakespeare.

Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Belgian detective Hercules Poirot was published in 1920. This was followed quickly by The Murder on the Links the following year. A prolific writer, Christie often published more than one book a year even when she was encountering difficult situations in life.

As most of us know, one of Agatha Christie’s famous books was Murder on the Orient Express.
This detective novel is based around a murder on a train that was stopped by heavy snowfall. Poirot was on a trip home to London from the Middle East and is interrupted to now solve the murder. The novel went on to be the number one top selling edition in the Collins Crime canon.

The year of 1926 was a particularly difficult for Christie, following the publication of The Secret of Chimneys in 1925. Her mother, Clara, died in April 1926 and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in June. On 3rd December of the same year, Christie’s husband Archie, asked her for a divorce. That evening, she kissed her sleeping daughter goodnight and left the family home. Her car was found on a slope by a quarry near Guildford. A nationwide manhunt followed but it led to no results. It was only 11 days later that she was identified as a guest at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel (now known as The Old Swan Hotel) in Harrogate, North Yorkshire (home of course to our bookshop!), where she was registered as ‘Mrs Teresa Neele’ from Cape Town.

The Big Four was subsequently published in January 1927.

For our selection of Agatha Christie novels, please click here